Sunday, December 1, 2013

Mother Earth never takes a holiday

Bumper sticker design by Will McCarty

I
always tell myself I’m going to take time off over the holidays, but it never
works out that way. I joke to folks “Hey, does Mother Earth ever take a
holiday? Do you ever get up, get ready for work, open the door and there’s no
‘there’ there?”

One
activity I engage in — via the site I share with fellow ApocaDoc Michael — is keeping track of major environmental news around the
planet.

Not
only does Mother Earth not take a break, the devastation we’re creating on the
planet doesn’t enjoy a holiday, either!

Ounce for ounce, methane
has an effect on global warming more than 30 times more potent than carbon
dioxide, and it's leaking from the Arctic Ocean at an alarming rate, according
to new research by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their article,
which appeared last week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, states
that the Arctic Ocean is releasing methane at a rate more than twice what
scientific models had previously anticipated.

Accounts
of the melting of Arctic ice proliferate. You can eye over 400 articles we’ve
collected over the past few years that will wake you up more effectively than a
triple espresso.

As that article in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner puts it:

… the Arctic
methane release creates a positive feedback loop. As temperatures increase,
more methane is released, and as more methane is released, temperatures
increase.

This
is causing havoc with our weather system, the systematic ganking of our climate
through the release of greenhouse gas pollution.

A story came out the day before Thanksgiving that puts Typhoon Haiyan into perspective, in terms of climate
change’s impact. The article talks about an atmospheric scientist at MIT, who
basically says Haiyan was rendered more severe by climate change… “because
warmer surface temperatures essentially provide more fuel for tropical storms.”

The MIT scientist and his
team compared “thermodynamic conditions that were present 30 years ago, in the
1980s, before the warming of the last few decades. They compared it to the
model using current conditions.”

In the process, they
discovered that “wind speeds are about ten percent larger now.”

Ten
percent goes a long away.

The
researcher concludes that in the case of an exceptional extreme weather event,
“almost nothing you might've done in preparation for it is going to work, it's
just too far out of human experience."

We’ve
collected almost 400 research papers and articles about extreme weather here.

Wow,
was there anything to be thankful for this week?

Sure;
family, friends and the fact that, according to BlackFridayDeathCount.com,
there was only one reported shopping injury this year.